With one exception.
Richard Nixon’s.
These libraries were created by the Presidential Records Act in 1939 with the dual purpose of giving the public a clear historical fix on where to place this president in the demands of his years in office and to provide a repository for his papers where they are available for public scrutiny. To this end, personal and political bias are anathema, to be flushed out by engaging teams of historians to review the museum’s plans for breadth, accuracy and reasonable objectivity.
If those dreamy goals are unattainable, there was at least a clear effort to achieve them, warts and all, under the aegis of federal oversight in the seven presidential museums I’ve visited.
But such restrictions were not for Nixon. He was never very good at the warts thing. As a result, he had a tough time finding a place to put down his museum. The faculty at UC Irvine — and, it was rumored, Duke University, also — was receptive to the idea of having the Nixon museum on campus, but only if the plans and content could be reviewed by professional historians. So 10 years ago, Nixon followers packed their bruised egos, returned to Yorba Linda, and built the first private presidential museum in the back yard of his boyhood home.
Now, the Nixon museum is being converted from a private to a public institution so that Nixon’s White House papers can finally find a home. In that process — under the direction of the National Archives — the whole place is being gentrified for historical accuracy and balance, and I’ve lost a prime tourist attraction, the finest example I’ve ever known of spinning history into an art form worthy of study.
Examples abound. The entire Watergate exhibit would lead a visitor from Outer Space to believe that Nixon was the victim of a vengeful process.
